Yemen is just one of several Middle Eastern countries in which
groups either allied with or directed by Iran are the strongest
political and military actor.

Yemen has been in political limbo for the past month after
President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and the government of Prime
Minister Khaled Bahah resigned after the Houthis seized the
presidential palace and confined the head of state to his
residence in a struggle to tighten control.

"This is a coup. There is no other word to describe what is
happening but a coup," Saleh al-Jamalani, a Yemeni army colonel,
told the Associated Press after rebels attacked the
presidential palace. He added that the rebels most likely had the
assistance from elements inside the deposed
government.

Yemen, which shares its
northern border with Saudi Arabia and is home to nearly 25
million people, was one of four countries to replace its leader
during the Arab Spring uprisings, along with Libya, Egypt, and
Tunisia. Now it threatens to become another one of the region's
violent political and military vacuums — with the added
complication of Yemen also being home to Al
Qaeda's most capable foreign affiliate.

The Houthis are a community of Shi'ite Muslim tribes from Yemen's
desert periphery. A Houthi insurgency has been ongoing for most
of the past decade, and it was sparked in the early 2000s by the
largely Sunni central government's encroachment on traditional
Houthi governance and traditional authority, along with the
group's traditional marginalization within Yemen's politics.

A former CIA operative
described Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, as the
“most powerful operative in the Middle East
today.”Fars
News

Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Qods Force, the foreign arm of
Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, is directing sectarian
militias in both Iraq and Syria. At the same time, Suleimani is
nurturing the guerilla proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis
in Yemen. In other words, Iran is controlling powerful Shia
proxies all across the Middle East.

"Suleimani is the leader of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen," Ali
Khedery, who served as a special
assistant to five US ambassadors and a senior adviser to three
heads of US Central Command between 2003 and
2009, told
The New York Times in December. "Iraq is not sovereign. It is
led by Suleimani, and his boss," referring to Iranian Supreme
Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

While the Houthis are not as direct an extension of Iranian
policy as Hezbollah and adhere to a different strain of Shia
Islam than the regime in Tehran, Friday's development still means
that an Iran-backed group has succeeded in replacing Yemen's
Western-backed transitional government. And it means Tehran is an
even more powerful player in a populous, largely ungoverned
country that borders oil-rich Saudi Arabia and
sits on a major global oil choke point at the mouth of the
Red Sea.